


Monsters

by MirandaBeth



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-20
Updated: 2012-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-31 12:39:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirandaBeth/pseuds/MirandaBeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of short scenes set throughout Claire's childhood and adolescence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Written after Season 2. Originally posted at my livejournal account 2007-12-08.

The year Claire turned three, she developed a fear of the dark, which appeared to be connected to the monster in her closet. He helped Sandra set up a night light for her, and listened to Sandra calming her, night after night, but Claire's fears continued, and he finally offered to give Sandra a night off.

He sat awkwardly on the chair at Claire's bedside, but seeing how distressed she was, moved gingerly to sit on the edge of the bed instead. She clung to him instantly, and he wasn't sure what to do with that.

"There _is_ a monster," she said, her voice thick with tears. "Mommy says there isn't, but I _know_ there is."

"I'm sure your mother checked very thoroughly," he said. "I don't think you have to worry about any monster, Claire."

"Maybe she just can't see it!"

He shrugged. "I don't know. But I do know one thing." He leaned in towards her conspiratorially. "Any monster that comes around here will have me to deal with."

She stared at him, eyes huge. Feeling like a fool – but after all, he only had a child for audience - he made a face and roared at her. She shrieked, and then giggled.

"See?" he said. "Much scarier than any monster. They wouldn't dare."

* * *

The year Claire turned five, she found a stray cat lying in the gutter outside their front yard. He saw her, face serious, squatting next to it (on the grass, she knew never to go on the road without him when they played in the front yard), and went to join her.

"I think he's sick, Daddy," she told him, reaching out carefully to touch its fur.

Her hand came away with the cat's blood on it.

"I think maybe it was hurt by a car, Claire," he said, squatting next to her, and quietly noting the animal's glazed eyes.

She shed tears over the cat's pain, and they agreed together to help it, getting a towel from the house to pick it up in. He said he would take it to the vet, and watched her eyes brighten. Aloysius, Sandra's dog, had been to the vet when he'd hurt himself falling from the sofa as a puppy, and he'd come home good as new.

She kissed the cat carefully, and wished it luck in life. Then she waved goodbye from the window of the den as he pulled out of the driveway.

He broke its neck himself, because there was no need for a vet to tell him something he already knew. He left the corpse in a dumpster, and returned home to find Claire helping Sandra to bake cupcakes, and stopping Lyle from opening cupboards he shouldn't.

* * *

The year Claire turned six, there were still evenings when he and Sandra would sit together on the sofa and watch TV, and he enjoyed the quiet companionship in ways he could not put into words. Claire formed the habit of needing a drink of water after bedtime on these evenings, and padding downstairs in her pyjamas to get her drink from the kitchen tap. It always ended in her being allowed to sit up with them for a "little while", sipping her water as they sipped their wine, and when she got sleepy, leaning against him in a way that was uncomfortable but inexplicably pleasant.

On one such evening, there was a news broadcast that was not relevant to him. A man with a gun had killed more than thirty people in one morning in a small town in Australia. The report spoke of a man in the town who waved goodbye to his wife and two small daughters that morning, and never saw them alive again. He ignored the sick feeling pressing at his throat, and belatedly realised that Claire, by his side, was giving the screen her full attention, eyes wide and face troubled.

It was too late to talk over the reporter.

She looked up at him as the story ended. "I don't understand. Why did he do that?"

"I don't know, Claire Bear," he said. "Hey, you know what? Time for you to get back to bed. Want me to read you a story?"

No one had read to her in a while – she could, after all, read perfectly well herself – but it turned out she did want him to. She took him upstairs and gave him a chapter book she was reading, and he sat at her bedside and read about a princess with magical powers, who found a sea monster in a lake. In the end, it turned out that the monster was not scary, just shy because no one liked the way he looked. When he finished the story, he left her peacefully asleep.

And after that, he changed the channel if he heard her feet on the stairs at news time.

* * *

The year Claire turned eight, one of her friends at school used an unfamiliar word in a casual way, and she chewed on it for a while before asking him what it meant. He was snatching a brief afternoon at home before an international flight, nursing a cup of coffee at the kitchen bench, while she sat opposite him with a glass of chocolate milk.

"Daddy," she asked, "what's 'torture'?"

He was almost always the one she went to for answers, as she thought he was good at explaining things. He _liked_ explaining things to her, liked seeing the little click behind her eyes as she grasped a new concept – always very quickly, he thought.

This time, he found himself in danger of not explaining anything at all. Another head of blonde hair drifted vaguely into his mind, belonging to a girl who'd been younger than Claire was now and not known to ask that question before learning its answer.

A seed of dread planted itself in his stomach at that moment, one he refused to name or examine too closely.

He cleared his throat and answered her question, as simply and lightly as he could, trying not to scare her. He thought he might have failed, and that it wasn't his words that had done it.

When he came home from his trip (it was Paris, that time), he brought her a teddy bear. He brought a stuffed elephant for Lyle, too. Lyle made up a story about the elephant, but lost track of it within a week. Claire placed her teddy bear in a position of honour on the centre of her bed.

Then again, the elephant had only ever been an elephant.

* * *

The year Claire turned nine, he had intermittent, wearying nightmares about Claude. One night he watched, unable to move or speak, as Claude came back, bullet wounds still open and dripping blood, and attacked a Claire who could not see him and did not know she was in danger until it was too late.

"Thought you said you didn't care about her," Claude taunted him.

He allocated himself breakfast-time to dwell on the dream, but instead found himself watching Claire play with her cereal before eating it. She liked every part of the bowl to be equally milk-soaked and mushy before she'd put it in her mouth, and they'd given her a pair of rollerblades for her last birthday, and she'd got in trouble yesterday for using them in the house, and she was putting together a project on explorers for school at the moment and today was the day she was going to hand it in, and she'd confessed that she missed Uncle Claude now that he'd moved away, because she wanted to show him part of the project that she thought he'd like, and she had no _idea_ , and how could anyone even _hide_ from something she had no idea about?

She looked up and caught his stare. "What?" she said, grinning.

He smiled back. "Nothing."

* * *

The year Claire turned twelve, he had to stop her invading his work. Not a literal invasion – he had cultivated in them a healthy disinterest in Dad's boring job – but much worse than that, a phantom invasion of her face floating before the terrified eyes of any children he… encountered.

It was not logical or rational, and it was a weakness. He carefully excised it from his thoughts, and moved on in freedom.

Claire was teetering on the edge of being a teenager, now. She shadowed her more advanced friend Jackie with a certain amount of awe, ignored her mother's advice about being herself instead of just following what her friends did, and could spend hours tying up the phone line. She sometimes giggled with her friends about boys in a not-quite-serious-yet-thank-God way when she thought he wasn't listening.

He thought girls of her age were meant to prefer make-up to toys.

But he got her a teddy bear from St Louis.

 

* * *

The year Claire turned sixteen, a man called Sylar tried to kill her, and she didn't know about the danger until it was too late. Until she had discovered that there were people in this world who would break her bones without thought, who would stalk her through the halls of her school while she ran in terror, who would kill and discard Jackie like Jackie was not the girl who'd played dress-ups with Claire when they were seven.

The world did not ask his permission before throwing itself off its axis to prove to Claire that it was rotten to the core. He tried, he fought, but in the end he could only watch from two steps behind, and hurt, and _hope_.

She'd said to him once that he couldn't protect her forever. And he couldn't.

But he could make her forget.

It was a question of security. The knowledge Claire had gained as she watched Sylar slice Jackie's head open was compromising in the wrong hands, and Claire didn't know which were the wrong hands. Once the initial aftermath had been dealt with, she would _need_ to forget.

He went into her room when he got home the night after Sylar's attack, and found her sitting at her desk, studying. She barely looked up as he came in. Her shoulders were tense, but there was no trace of the panic she'd shown on the phone just ten minutes earlier.

He picked up a teddy bear from her bed automatically, wanting something to hold. It turned out to be the bear he'd bought in New York City the day a geneticist from India had told him about a list he'd made, and how exciting it was that Claire Bennet's name was on it.

"Everything okay, Claire Bear?" he asked, in a carefully neutral tone. Nothing to suggest she'd just called him in terror of a mysterious threat that had made her friend and brother forget, and nothing to suggest that she hadn't, either.

She didn't meet his eye, too intent on her textbook. "Sure, Dad. Just catching up on some homework."

He did not need to push her any further.

"That's great," he said cheerfully, patting her on the shoulder. He thought he felt her tense further under his hand, but that was not likely. "You've been working so hard lately. I'm so proud of you."

She gave him a weak smile, still not quite meeting his eyes, and turned back to her book.

He placed the bear gently back amongst its fellows on the bed before he left the room. She didn't remember.

He should have felt relief.

Two days later, the police released to the media the name of the student who had been murdered at Union Wells High School, and the reporters immediately renewed their interest in the story, filling the TV screens and the newspapers with every gory detail they could lay hands on.

He was not there when Claire heard the news.

* * *

The year Claire was to turn seventeen, she told him she hated him.

She had seen a lot by then, even since the day she had torn her mask off in bitterness and rage and told him that she'd remembered all along. She had taught him that saying sorry with words did not make it better, and he had thought that sorry with actions might. For a while, it did.

Then she had met a boy from St Louis, and he maybe would never really understand why that was the final straw.

He could fight like hell to hide her from the people he had once trusted. He could kill to cover tracks that led to her. He could risk his own certain death to save her when it all went wrong.

But in the end, he knew that there was – there had been, all along - one monster he feared above the others, and nothing he could do had protected her from finally coming face to face with it.

Maybe that had always been inevitable.

But even so, that monster would continue to drive the other monsters away as long as it could. No matter what she thought of it.


End file.
